The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  Xenia Karlovna Ziller, the blonde girlfriend and tennis partner who had so provoked Olga during her pregnancy, became his second wife on 3 June. Xenia’s family was also German - the Chekhovs seemed to have had a decided bent in that direction - and her father owned, or rather used to own, a factory in Moscow for automobile lubricants. Xenia, by her kindness and calmness, managed to restore Misha’s confidence. ‘She fell in love with a ruin of man,’ wrote Sergei Chekhov, ‘and managed to restore this ruin to life.’ Misha, with a typical disregard for the political and economic reality of the moment, then set up an acting studio, where his teaching skills attracted a number of young actors. ‘Chekhov’s Studio’ helped restore his professional confidence, even if it did little for his fortunes.

  He was still vulnerable, however, to the ravages of alcohol when under stress. His mother, Natalya, died in March 1919 and this triggered another crisis. Misha claims to have travelled across Moscow to find her body among a pile of corpses, all the victims of a typhus epidemic, just before they were thrown into a mass grave.

  Other accounts, including that of his cousin Sergei, suggest that he was so drunk and in such a nervous state when he buried his mother that he forgot where her grave was afterwards: an interesting case of psychological suppression, if true. Yet the death of his mother appears to have lifted a huge, menacing presence from his mind, and soon after he rejoined the Moscow Art Theatre. His haunted, tragic clown’s face was able to smile again.

  Many old people expired in that terrible winter of cold, disease and starvation. Misha also lost his Chekhov grandmother. Aunt Masha had sent news from Yalta that Evgenia Chekhova was dead. And Olga’s grandmother, Anna Salza-Knipper, the professor at the conservatoire, also succumbed. It was almost as if the new regime had planned an accelerated removal of those who could not adapt to the harsh realities of Soviet life.

  8. Surviving the Civil War

  The Russian Civil War, without clear front lines and covering huge distances, became a ‘railway war’. Armoured trains provided both the symbol and the reality of conspicuous power and terror. Small armies and irregular bands attacked and counter-attacked from town to town along the endless tracks. There was little alternative. Neither side had more than a handful of motor vehicles and the unsurfaced roads turned to mud during the rainy seasons of spring and autumn - the rasputitsa. Konstantin Knipper’s expertise as a railway director therefore made him extremely valuable to Admiral Kolchak’s White Army when it began to establish itself astride the Trans-Siberian railway during the winter of 1918—19.

  The defeat of Germany in November 1918 and the promises of the Entente powers to aid the Whites produced a surge of optimism among anti-Bolsheviks. In fact Bolshevik control appeared to be waning rapidly. The Ukraine, the ‘breadbasket’ of Russia, became the territory for a triangular, if not a quadrilateral, civil war between Reds, Whites, Anarchists and Ukrainian nationalists. The Volunteer Army, now commanded by General Denikin, which had survived two bitter campaigns in the Caucasus, swelled with Cossack auxiliaries after the savage advance of Red Guards through their villages across the Don steppe. But the Cossacks were a law unto themselves and deliberately uncooperative. The attempt by their so-called Don Army to take Tsaritsyn on the lower Volga at the end of 1918 was an abject failure. The myth of its heroic defence helped Stalin, the commissar there, on his way to power. Later, the expanding city was rebuilt and called Stalingrad in his honour.

  The Whites were so short of ordinary soldiers that junior officers had to serve as privates and corporals, while majors and colonels found themselves with the equivalent of a lieutenant’s command. There were so many generals from the old Tsarist army that some of them were reduced to commanding battalions or even companies. This frustrated obsession with rank inevitably produced terrible rivalries and constant prima donna outbursts. The White commanders were fixated with their Tsarist uniforms, shoulder-boards, salutes and Peter the Great’s ‘Table of Ranks’, which defined all hierarchy. They had truly learned nothing and forgotten nothing during the revolutionary period of the last two years. Their insistence on attempting to turn back the clock to the days of Tsarist autocracy and erase all hope of land reform deterred even anti-Bolshevik peasants, whose support they badly needed if they were to maintain their armies in rations as well as manpower.

  Many commanders were so obsessive in their hatred of Bolshevism that they seem to have become totally unbalanced. Lev Knipper, serving with the Whites in the south, later described their commander, General Khludov. He had a heavy stare and would walk up and down the lines on inspection, paying particular attention to any man forcibly conscripted into their ranks. Sometimes, after a long gaze, he would suddenly say to one of them: ‘You’ve got red devils playing in your head!’ and would shoot him on the spot.

  Lev in later years rewrote his own history in a shamelessly disingenuous fashion. He claimed that at the time of the revolution he had been staying with relatives in the south of Russia—presumably Aunt Masha in Yalta - and had been conscripted into the White Army. He went on to write that he had found ordinary soldiers to be physically, morally and intellectually superior to him and he had then deserted. In fact Lev had remained with the army of Baron Wrangel right until the end and went into exile with it in 1920.

  The Whites’ loathing of Bolshevism had started with a burning resentment at their loss of privilege, wealth and power. It was then immeasurably strengthened by the cruelty with which captured officers were treated by left-wing mobs. There were numerous cases of mutilation, including castration and flaying alive. The hated shoulder-boards of captured officers were sometimes nailed into their shoulders. According to White sources, the most notorious torture carried out by local Chekas on captured officers was known as ‘the glove treatment’, in honour of what soldiers saw as a key item of a Tsarist officer’s apparel. The victim’s hands and forearms were plunged into boiling water and held there until the skin peeled off. Chekas would compete with each other in the horrifying originality of the tortures they could inflict on their victims.

  Red Terror begat White Terror and Russia reverted to the barbarism of Ivan the Terrible and the cruel repression of the Pugachev rebellion. The Whites did not hold back in their revenge on the Antichrist. Even the wives and children of suspected ‘red’ workers and peasants were bayoneted indiscriminately when a village or town was captured. Similar reprisals would be taken by Red Guards against bourgeois families. In the murderous chaos, Stanislavsky’s brother and three nephews were shot in the Crimea. It was not surprising that so many preferred suicide to capture in this politically sadistic conflict.

  The Russian civil war was also a war of confusion and misunderstanding. Even those in the Kremlin itself, with access to telephone and telegraph, seldom had a clear idea of what was happening across the great Eurasian landmass. The general public knew far less, in fact nothing beyond rumours and the optimistic communiques published in Pravda.

  At the beginning of May 1919, a touring group from the Art Theatre left Moscow for a three-week season in the eastern Ukraine. One of the initial reasons behind this tour was the greater ease of feeding the cast in the south than in Moscow. Nobody had told them that the civil war had erupted again, this time with a three-sided attack on central Russia. Admiral Kolchak, with the grand title of ‘Supreme Ruler’, was advancing out of Siberia with 100,000 men towards the Volga. General Denikin had started an attack northwards from the anti-Bolshevik heartland of the south, while General Yudenich was to advance later on Petrograd from the Baltic states. Stanislavsky had no inkling of the ‘catastrophe’ about to befall his theatre. He went to the station to see off the touring group, led by Olga Knipper-Chekhova and Vasily Kachalov, the leading actor of his time, on their way to Kharkov. There were a number of hangers-on and spouses who accompanied them, including Kachalov’s wife and their sixteen-year-old son, Vadim Shverubovich.

  The Art Theatre group, in high spirits to be leaving Moscow, travelled south in specially disinfect
ed cattle wagons with their scenery and props. In Kharkov, they were billeted in an abandoned and dilapidated hotel, the Russia, which ‘still retained an air of pre-revolutionary elegance’. Their performances began at six to allow audiences home before the curfew, which started at nine. The cast were surprised to find that, despite the confident pronouncements of Soviet newspapers, Kharkov appeared to be on a war footing. One evening, their performance of The Cherry Orchard began on time but during the second act there seemed to be an unusual amount of noise on the street outside. The Art Theatre’s stage manager went to see what was happening and found that the advance guard of General Denikin’s White forces had entered the city unopposed. The Red Guards had fled. The stage manager returned and announced to the audience what had happened. Once the cheering had died down, he added that the play would resume where it had left off.

  The rapidity of the city’s capture was a far greater mercy than they realized. Usually, a local Cheka detachment would murder all their prisoners before abandoning a city, along with any bourgeois they could find. And the Kharkov Cheka, led by the notorious Saenko, a cocaine-addicted psychopath, was one of the cruellest. Nevertheless, the Kachalov group, as it came to be called after their leading actor, found itself in a quandary. Should they try to cross the lines, abandoning their props and scenery, to rejoin the Art Theatre in Moscow? Or would it be wiser to await events? The Reds seemed to be in full retreat on all fronts. Kachalov’s son, Vadim, rushed off to join the White Army in a burst of enthusiasm. His parents were horrified when they discovered what he had done.

  On 19 June, Tsaritsyn finally fell to Baron Wrangel’s Caucasian Army, supported by British tanks. The White commanders were convinced that the capital was now in their grasp. One actor called Podgorny, desperate to rejoin his wife in Moscow, decided to take his chances. He did manage to get back, but this made all those members of the cast who stayed in White territory suspect in the eyes of the Bolshevik authorities. There were rumours in Moscow about the ‘political demonstration’ of the Kachalov group, an impression that was not helped when White generals insisted on giving banquets in honour of the Art Theatre actors.

  The guest season in Kharkov was extended until the end of June, then the actors took a holiday in the Crimea. They arranged to meet up again in September. Everyone expected that Moscow would have fallen to the Whites by then. Olga Knipper-Chekhova went straight to Yalta to see her sister-in-law, Masha, now tending the Chekhov house as a museum. She stayed in her own little house not far away at Gurzuf, on the shore of the Black Sea. There, with other members of the touring group, they planned an autumn season, starting in Odessa. Masha, who had seen Lev in good health, completely forgot to tell Aunt Olya, who worried desperately about what might have happened to her favourite nephew. Olga Knipper-Chekhova was overcome with disbelief and exasperation later when she found out that such an important detail had slipped Masha’s mind. Vasily Kachalov and his wife, meanwhile, were overjoyed to see Vadim during their holiday in the Crimea. He was fit and well, but still serving in the ranks of a White regiment.

  Communications within the diminishing territory of Soviet Russia were so bad that the Art Theatre in Moscow did not hear of the capture of Kharkov by the Whites until early August. An emergency meeting was called and Stanislavsky, who was away from Moscow at the time, had to travel back overnight to the capital. They all knew that the loss of their most experienced actors ‘took away all chance of producing any new plays and also of continuing our old repertoire’. There was little choice. ‘We had to refill our ranks with actors from the Studios, they with actors who had nothing to do with the Art Theatre.’ For some, this was a blessing rather than a disaster. The absence of the theatre’s leading actor, Kachalov, was to give Mikhail Chekhov his great opportunity.

  Nemirovich-Danchenko’s continuing disagreements with Stanislavsky made decision-making exceptionally hard. He felt, with a good deal ofjustification, that Stanislavsky was a hopeless idealist. In his view, the Moscow Art Theatre had to cut back to survive. Stanislavsky’s grandiose plans, including the main theatre and its offshoot studios, had even extended to opening a provincial theatre network. But the argument was soon resolved from above. In December, the whole profession was reorganized under state control. The Art Theatre, along with its former imperial counterparts, became an ‘Academic’ theatre of the Soviet state, and was subsidized accordingly.

  Stanislavsky, despite Nemirovich-Danchenko’s suspicions, believed far more passionately in the theatre than in himself. He did everything he could to make sure that other members of the Art Theatre had food and lodging, yet when the local Bolshevik housing committee evicted him from his own house, he told nobody at first. Stanislavsky, who bent over backwards to avoid criticizing the revolution, made no complaint, just as he had never protested when the family factory and all his other wealth were confiscated. He apparently wept in private at the loss of his home, yet made no attempt to contest the eviction order. Fortunately word reached Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, who went straight to Lenin.

  Lenin had become a great admirer of the Moscow Art Theatre. After all his years of exile, he took every opportunity to catch up on its productions, especially Chekhov’s The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya. He was also deeply impressed by Stanislavsky’s performance as General Krutitsky in Ostrovsky’s Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man. ‘Stanislavsky is a real artist,’ Lenin wrote afterwards. ‘He transformed himself into the General so completely that he lived his life down to the smallest detail. The audience don’t need any explanations. They can see for themselves what an idiot this important-looking general is. In my opinion this is the direction the theatre should take.’ Lenin had little time for Lunacharsky’s doctrine of Proletkult.

  The most scathing critic of Chekhov and Stanislavsky at this time was the Futurist poet Mayakovsky, who described their theatre as ‘putrescent’ and satirized it with lines about ’Auntie Manya, Uncle Vanya, sitting on the sofa whining‘. Yet Mayakovsky would be one of the casualties of the brave new world which he had so gladly welcomed. ’We interpreted Mayakovsky’s suicide,‘ the writer Isaac Babel told his NKVD interrogators before he was executed, ’as the poet’s conclusion that it was impossible to work under Soviet conditions.‘

  The early autumn of 1919 proved the critical moment of the Russian Civil War. Admiral Kolchak’s forces advancing from Siberia had started to disintegrate under pressure from the Red Army in front and from peasant revolts in the rear, provoked by the Whites’ looting and brutality. But the southern front still struck fear into the Bolsheviks. By the end of August, General Denikin’s White forces had captured almost all the major cities of the Ukraine. Deep cavalry raids by Cossack commanders such as General Mamontov seized key cities on the road north, including Voronezh on the upper Don.

  General Denikin had laid down the plan of attack in his ‘Moscow Directive’. On 14 October, one of his armies captured Orel, just 250 miles from Moscow, and stood ready to threaten Tula, the Soviet Republic’s centre of arms manufacture. At the same time, General Yudenich’s army, advancing out of Estonia, had reached the outskirts of Petrograd, ‘the cradle of the Revolution’. In Moscow, escape plans were made for leading Bolsheviks, with the issue of false passports and Tsarist currency. In the Crimea, the upper- and middle-class refugees from the north were convinced that the Bolshevik nightmare was almost over and that they would soon be able to go home. In that early autumn of 1919, the promenade in Yalta was once again full of ladies and girls in long white dresses, with parasols and large straw hats, and even the odd small dog, just as it had been in Anton Chekhov’s day.

  9. The Dangers of Exile

  The collapse of the White armies in the autumn of 1919 was sudden, catastrophic and largely of their own making. They had utterly alienated the peasantry in their rear by arrogance, brutality, looting, rape and the execution of hostages in villages where men evaded conscription. As the Whites advanced on Moscow, even those who loath
ed the Bolsheviks began attacking their lines of communication, especially in the Ukraine. The White generals had also alienated all those peripheral nations who wanted to loosen their links to Russia. These diehard imperialists banned the speaking of Ukrainian and refused the slightest degree of independence to their Cossack allies.

  Denikin’s armies, some 150,000 strong at the start, became increasingly short of supplies. Men had to be sent back to guard the rear from partisan attacks, and at the front their ill-fed conscripts deserted in large numbers. The situation was even more disastrous on their flank, where the Cossack Army of the Don began to melt away. Its advance had already been greatly slowed by the wagon trains of booty acquired on the way. The Cossacks, who saw no reason why they should fight for an ungrateful Russia, wanted to return to the Don steppe with their ill-gotten loot. They utterly failed to foresee the vengeance which the Reds would exact on their villages once the Whites were defeated.

  The ranks of the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were swelling that autumn due to a change of policy. The Kremlin leadership had offered an amnesty to deserters. By mid-October they outnumbered the Whites on the southern front. They were also helped by the fact that the peasants, who hated them, loathed the idea of a White victory even more. Those who now worked the land seized from the barins feared the loss of all their gains in the revolution.

  The Reds concentrated their efforts on the defence of Tula and its arms factories. At the same time they prepared their counter-attack, a strike at the flank of the Volunteer Army marching on Tula. This was carried out by the Bolshevik Praetorian Guard, the division of Latvian Riflemen. The Red cavalry, an arm which the Bolsheviks had lacked until then, was thrown against the Cossacks. Meanwhile, just as Petrograd was about to fall to Yudenich’s army, Trotsky rushed to the city. In a whirlwind of energy, he revived its defence with rousing speeches and ruthless executions.